Conservation äs a problem for libraries, äs an aspect of library management, has a long and respectable history. As long ago äs 1898, the Prefect of the Vatican Library convened an international congress at St. Gall to which librarians from all over the world came to pool their experience and ideas. The cause of the Conference and the major subject of discussion was the deterioration of paper, particularly the new cheap papers made from woodpulp by processes barely a generation old but already seen to be dangerously prone to rapid decay. The St. Gall Conference proved influential in many respects. Several libraries set up permanent Conservation laboratories, and at the Bodleian Library Oxford controlled tests of the efficacy of various methods of treating paper were made. However it appears that no international meeting of the senior librarians of the world's major libraries has considered the problem in the ensuing eighty years (with the notable exception of the'recent establishment of IFLA's Conservation Section), and although Conservation techniques and those engaged in them have grown substantially in that period, the Conservation problems facing libraries have increased still more.In 1898 the problems were primarily seen äs technical: to establish why paper broke down, how to support it, how to repair the other damage sustained by books and documents from biological, physical or mechanical causes. Use was taken for granted äs a constant but invariable factor, to which all books were equally subject. The environment was hardly regarded äs a factor, although dirt and damage resulting from urban pollution, and the biological and climatic problems in tropical countries were already recognised: little, however, could be done to prevent either. The effect that these and other problems might have on the library äs a whole lay in the future.Towards the end of the twentieth Century, we are only beginning to realize that the preservation of library materials presents problems of which the chronic world shortage of trained Conservation staff and adequate technical
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